Given Anthony’s deep commitment to (muddying) the climate debate, you’d think he’d be upset that a climate topic isn’t among EurekaAlert’s 2014 most popular press releases. (No link to the source in Anthony’s post.) Shouldn’t he want more chances to fool the public, to spread confusion, to smear “bureaucrats”?

No, Anthony’s happy that climate issues seem to be losing attention. He does his best work in the shadows and under rocks.

Like this:

“97% of pictures are worth 1000 climate words“ (2014-02-27). Anthony Watts posts a profound intellectual insight from his favourite denialist blow-hard, Lord Monckton. Shockingly, it seems that not every single climate paper is about the cause of the current rapid global temperature rise! Many of them don’t even mention the issue! Therefore no Global Warming.

In other equally profound news, the cause of Global Warming is never mentioned in surgical journals, more excellent proof that there is no Global Warming.

But wait, Monckton’s claim is that “Only 64 of 11,944 published since 1991 said most warming since 1950 was manmade: i.e. 0.5%” This means that 11,880 papers asserted that the warming has been natural! I’m looking forward to reading some of them.

Sadly for the loony Lord, no. The other climate papers about other subjects entirely.

Somehow this educational so-called newsletter manages to forget the recent news that Gray’s denialist New Zealand Climate Science Coalition was ordered to pay costs of $90,000 by the NZ High Court in the wake of their abandoned lawsuit against the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. Their lawsuit was declared not in the public interest and they “cannot claim to have acted reasonably.” Seems they wanted to force the NIWA to change New Zealand’s official temperature record to match their biases because of… reasons.

But Gray’s still the guy to impartially explain climate science to us and he wants us to know that carbon dioxide and ‘greenhouse gases’ “have no place in a scientific study of the climate.”

Dr. Gray also shares his nuanced understanding of the flaws of modern climate modelling:

“completely different computer models”
They are not. GCMs are adaptions of numerical weather forecasting models which do take into account longer term forcings such as GHGs (which make insignificant change on a 10 day period). Some, like GFDL, can be and are used for numerical weather forecasting too.

· The earth can be considered flat
Certainly not. They use a spherical grid with topographic coordinates. Here is GFDL doing SST. Flat Earth?

“The sun has a constant intensity, both day and night.”
No. Diurnal and seasonal solar are calculated for each location

“All energy exchanges are by radiation”
No, heat is convected, with turbulent transfer and of course, latent heat is computed.

“Energy entering the earth equals that leaving”
Well, it does, to a very good approximation. Only recently has a discrepancy been measurable, and I’m sure that will be included.

“All change is caused by changes in: greenhouse gases”
Where on earth do you get that from? They are solving time varying PDEs.

Natural influences are merely: ”variable”
I don’t even know what that means.

Let’s see… this is a leak by an actual insider IPCC expert! Now that ought to get everyone’s attention! Oh, our expert is just Anthony Watts’ blogging buddy Alex Rawls and his “expertise” consists of being able to promise that he wouldn’t release any of the IPCC AR5 draft text. (Looks like he dropped that ball pretty quick via a bit of self-sainting: “As for my personal confidentiality agreement with the IPCC, I regard that as vitiated by the systematic dishonesty of the report“.) Actual science credentials? Zip. He’s just another denialist nutter who thinks he’s the next Galileo.

But still, he must have found something juicy to break his earnest confidentiality pledge! Wazzit? Here’s the game-changing sentence Alec decided to hang his hat on:

The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link.

So the juicy sentence was just a minor aspect of a solar influence discussion (spoiler: the influence is big, obviously, but so invariant as to be irrelevant to modern climate trends). Really, how could there be anything “game-changing” in an IPCC report? It’s freakin’ based on the existing published science!

Is Alec stupid enough to think that a bit of draft text from a scientific summary would be how we suddenly recognise a paradigm shift in climate science? Apparently, yes. Alec also consider’s himself a national hero for bravely blowing his whistle. Both of these beliefs merit a solid whack on the side of the head.

A few other worthwhile comments on the matter:

RealClimate – “A review of cosmic rays and climate: a cluttered story of little success”

Skeptical Science – “IPCC Draft Report Leaked, Shows Global Warming is NOT Due to the Sun”

Scientific American – “Climate deniers used the leak to press their case but the new IPCC report closes the case on a human cause for global warming”

Dr. Svalgaard has been a tireless respondent to a cacophony of denialist solar ignorance at Watts Up With That. Maybe they’ll finally take this onboard: nothing in the pattern of sunspots, solar radiation. solar wind, or cosmic rays has any correlation to the dramatic climate changes the Earth has experienced in modern times.

My bet though is that the cranks will simply take the data he has referenced and start a new round of fevered cherry-picking.

Did they deliberately release their review when they thought they would be safe from Spencer’s devastating intellectual rebuttal? Those cunning, corrupt, dishonest communist climate scientists! But the always high-minded Anthony Watts sorted it out with an e-mail offering ethics advice. Anthony’s readers start the libeling by themselves.

So what of Spencer’s book? Could he be right? Would it really take “only one research study to cause the global warming house of cards to collapse”?

Well unless you embrace Spencer’s astonishing belief that decades of work by thousands of scientists around the world could actually flip into untold thousands of admissions of “my bad”, no.

Instead Spencer accuses “the IPCC researchers” of “fundamental mistakes” that only he has discovered, but never identifies the dumb scientists or references their alleged mistakes. He waves away detailed paleo data with “we don’t have a clue”. (I suppose as a creationist he is uncomfortable with any date before 4004 BC.) He’s so intellectually flexible that he’s already contradicted his own book in later papers. Is it true that “short-term fluctuations in the energy balance and surface temperature are consistent with a low climate sensitivity” (the whatever-he-can-get-away-with book, April 2010), or that “the climate system is never in equilibrium” ( the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research, August 2010)? I guess the ice ages are impossible.

Perhaps next Spencer will be confidently asserting that toothpicks are made when beavers sneeze? He should stick to remote sensing, where he actually has some expertise.